Imagination Creations | Imaginative Video ProductionImaginative Video Production for Explaner Videos, Whiteboard Videos and all Promotional videos2015-03-03T16:45:19Zhttp://imaginationcreations.com/feed/atomWordPressadminhttp://www.imaginationcreations.comhttp://imaginationcreations.com/?p=20322015-03-02T16:32:18Z2015-03-03T16:45:19ZContinue reading →]]>Staying organized while editing is crucial, especially when dealing with larger projects and sequences. There are many ways to stay organized in Premiere Pro, and using Label colors is a great why to avoid getting lost in you own mess of footage!

Label colors can be used in two key ways; in your project bins or on your timelines, and those methods are not mutually exclusive.

Footage in project bins can be labeled with colors. You might want to label all of CAM 1 as YELLOW and CAM 2 as BLUE, while making all audio GREEN and all images PINK. Once you label your assets in this way, those selected colors will remain when bringing those assets on your timelines.

A second use for label colors, one that I use more commonly, is to help sort through and organize interview footage. When going through my interviews, I like to drop my selects onto a timeline, and then change their label color in accordance with the topic they are speaking about. In a recent promotional video I worked on for a summer camp, I labeled all interview content about the staff in GREEN, and all content about field trips in PINK. (And so on…)

By doing this, I can then use the ‘Select Label Group’ feature and move all my selected clips about one topic to a new timeline to edit just those clips about that topic.

Premiere Pro also allows you to change the preset colors for labels as well as the names assigned. This changes can be made by choosing Premiere Pro > Preferences > Label Colors.

Check out our video tutorial on this to see these practices in action.

]]>0adminhttp://www.imaginationcreations.comhttp://imaginationcreations.com/?p=19442015-02-24T19:27:21Z2015-02-24T19:24:09ZContinue reading →]]>When I’m not out filming or meeting with clients, it is a safe bet that I’m in my office editing. That means I’m switching back and forth between Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (Not to mention some related Photoshop and Illustrator files as well as the odd Google Doc.)

For someone who spends so much time working with files in After Effects and Premiere Pro, a way to make the two work together is a highly valuable tool. Enter Adobe Dynamic Link. Adobe Dynamic Link is a system that Adobe introduced with the release of Adobe Creative Suite 3 back in 2007 to allow sequences from Premiere Pro and compositions from After Effects to live in each others software without having to render out a video file and import it. It is meant to be a major time saver and a way to increase efficiency. (Adobe Dynamic Link also has other functions in Adobe Encore and Adobe Audition.)

When I first began learning about Dynamic Link, I was blown away by what it offered, and years later, I still am. BUT… while Adobe Dynamic Link looks great in a product demo, it comes with its share of problems that make using it still worthwhile, however, very frustrating.

I use Dynamic Link for two main purposes. Firstly, bringing soundtracks edited in Premiere Pro into After Effects, and secondly, brining After Effects comps into Premiere Pro.

Much of the work I do at my production company, Imagination Creations, are animated explainers. Cute animated videos, often between 2 and 3 minutes, that explain a product or a service. I create all the animation within After Effects, but I edit all the audio in Premiere Pro. I’ll record voiceover, add music and then add sound effects. With my workflow, I’ll be constantly making adjustments to the Premiere Pro audio track while I progress in my After Effects animation. Dynamic Link is a very powerful tool to allow me to quickly add a sound effect, or adjust the volume of the music, or fix the pacing of my voiceover… when it works. Quite often, changes I make in Premiere Pro don’t get reflected in the linked sequence in After Effects. Reloading the clip doesn’t help, nor does re-saving the Premiere project. Even relinking the sequence doesn’t work. One solution I found, is to ensure that the linked layer in After Effects is collapsed, and the audio waveform of that layer is hidden. This is the best trick I’ve found so far, despite doing a fair amount of research. This trick however, only works about 75% of the time, and when it does, it is quite annoying to have to remember to collapse that layer each time you make an audio adjustment in Premiere Pro. The other solution is to shut down both applications, and relaunch them. This will work, but it is far from ideal.

My second and equally important use for Adobe Dynamic Link, is probably the more common use. Importing After Effects comps into a Premiere Pro sequence. For those familiar with my work, you’ve seen that I’ve done a number of videos using the parallax photo technique, where I break apart 2-dimensional photos in Photoshop and edit them in After Effects to give them a 3-dimensional effect. I might have 20 of these comps that import into Premiere Pro and lay out on my timeline. So far so good. The trouble occurs during playback. Because these are After Effects comps using large high resolution photos, Premiere Pro can’t play these back smoothly, and therefor rendering is required on the Premiere timeline. That is understandable, but what I have trouble understanding is the render times. Doing a RAM preview in After Effects might take 60 seconds for a particular comp, but rendering that same comp in Premiere Pro often takes upwards of 5 minutes. It makes playback very time consuming, and comes close to negating the benefits of dynamically linking the After Effects comps all together. There is still value in doing it, in that while the render times might end up being longer, you do save the headache of having to deal with a series of rendered versions of your AE comps, as well as having to reimport and replace each time you need to tweak your comps.

I’ve been using Adobe Dynamic Link in my workflow for the better part of three years now, and it has become the feature that I’ve come to love to hate. It offers great workflow improvements, and despite the caveats that I outlined above, I’ll continue to use it and in turn, continue to complain about it.

]]>0adminhttp://www.imaginationcreations.comhttp://imaginationcreations.com/?p=17902014-09-03T13:03:56Z2014-09-02T00:11:51ZContinue reading →]]>There is nothing more rewarding then being able to put your skills toward helping a charity. Produced for Life Vest Inside, The Science of Giving is an animated explainer video that scientifically proves to the world why it is good to give!

Inspired by ‘Designed by Apple’, completing this project was lots of fun, but it didn’t come without its share of challenges. Telling a story with a series of dots takes much imagination and creativity. On the technical side, a lot of thought went into how to animate the various scenes to make the video feel natural and consistent.

]]>0adminhttp://www.imaginationcreations.comhttp://imaginationcreations.com/?p=17702014-06-26T17:09:49Z2014-06-26T17:09:49ZContinue reading →]]>Imagination Creations founder, Ari Grunzeweig, has just been selected as a Creative Cow Leader!

Creative cow is a leading peer based website where creative professionals and amateurs alike turn to in order to learn, find solutions to challenges, or just see the cool stuff people are doing the the creative world.

Creative Cow has been a great resource for me throughout my career. Their tutorials and user forums are always very helpful and generally provide fast answers to your technical questions. My two tutorials, Green Screen Billboard Compositing and After Effects Handwriting Tutorial are now featured on Creative Cow. I am hoping to be able to create more soon.

]]>0adminhttp://www.imaginationcreations.comhttp://imaginationcreations.com/?p=17622014-06-16T23:41:24Z2014-06-16T23:41:24ZContinue reading →]]>Augmented reality is a technology where a user sees a static image come to life by looking at it through their phone or other enabled device. The challenge presented to me by my client was to simulate this technology, with out having to rent a city billboard.

This was a fun project to tackle as it covered a number of different concepts and effects. Due to this, the tutorial is a bit long, but I think you will learn a lot!